A heated discussion lately went viral on social media, following a user asked a query to women: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and could easily cause an existential crisis if you thought on it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up in which some males came online to inform females how stupid they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at least allowed those females who were uncertain about their decision to make it with renewed assurance.
Portraying the Setup
To Cook a Bear skillfully brings to life this clever small premise. The six-part drama is based on Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book with the identical title (rendered two years later for English readers). It traces the struggles of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly appreciate his puritanical stance on alcohol and dancing, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from which hails the pastor’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in societal fairness and equality that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis powers that be.
The Opposing Forces
Quickly in cahoots opposing him include the sheriff the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (the actress), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight of his pulped hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought for a few bottles of liquor sold by the unsettling shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, in fairness, Lindmark’s creepiness pales when itinerant painter the artist Beronius arrives in the story (the performer, delivering a performance of exceptional discomfiting power). If they are – similar to the clergyman – only a little more than caricatures, they still serve as effective ones.
Plot Progression
With the seeds of tension planted, it is time to proceed to narrative business. The servant from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her escape and animal scratches upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods spread, but the pastor holds a different view that he and Jussi set out to verify.
An Odd Beast
This Bear Drama is a slightly peculiar show. It conjures a fine sense of the desolation that lets distrust and bias and dark myths thrive from the native legend that bears might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t idealising the tough existence experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, whether that of nature or mankind, always looms on the edges, waiting to erupt. Yet the personas rarely become beyond symbols – or perhaps, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, logic and faith, good and evil escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly becoming immersive.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist the many tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective the English sleuth – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate assistant figure (neither of whom were required to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse from a bog.
Opposing Goals
The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid met her end by an animal, perhaps to preserve the calm, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is intent on proving the opposite, and the evidence so rapidly accumulates supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s the serpent tale, with its evocation of the competing allures and terrors presented by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it does seem to offer the answer to that debated question: “Ladies, take the bear.”
To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.
